Sunday, October 19, 2008

'Species-being', labour and nature

The text below was sent as an e-mail on Saturday morning, as some people are still having trouble accepting the blog invitations. I thought I'd post it here anyway:

Rita raised an excellent question on Thursday, as to what'nature,' 'natural' and 'human nature' might mean for Marx. We spoke alittle about the sense in which he holds human nature to be historicallycontextual, and John pointed out that this can be seen in his account of'species-being'.

(N.B. The text is entitled 'estranged' labour rather than 'alienated'labour as Marx employs two German words for alienation: 'Entäusserung' and'Entfremdung'. Entausserung means externalisation, objectification, i.e.selling property, my labour power, making my intentions manifest in realactivity. Entfremdung is more to do with subjective experience, i.e. twopeople feeling alienated from one another ('estranged' in thistranslation). Just googled this explanation by Chris Arthur, which lookspretty good: http://chrisarthur.net/dialectics-of-labour/appendix.html)

Anyway, back to 'species-being': as I understand it, the term can beexplained fairly quickly as follows. For Hegel, particular humanindividuals were to recognise their unity with others throughcomprehending the reason that underpins the universe; a little likerecognising God to be the truth and meaning of everything.

According to Feuerbach, this was too much like Christianity: for him,partiular human beings were not to recognise their unity in some abstract,fantastical, ideal universal posited above their real existence, butrather in human beings themselves. Universality would be found in thespecies of humanity, and philosophy would thus allow humanity to arrive ata self-conscious awareness of its own 'species-being'.

Marx really likes this, but thinks it has drawbacks (see the famous Theseson Feuerbach:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm). Thesedrawbacks basically boil down to the claim that although Feuerbach hadsucceeded in bringing philosophy down from the clouds, he still concievedmaterial reality in static, immobile terms (i.e. the human species as anabsolute rather than a historically contingent category). Reality issubject to historical change, and - crucially - human beings are capableof serving as the agents of change. The real nature of human beings is thecapacity to shape and consciously experience history, and it is in thisrespect that Marx ends up with a notion of 'species-being' based aroundformative activity. This can be seen fairly clearly in the essay onEstranged Labour.

Anway, all of this can be summed up in the famous exhortation from the endof the Theses on Feuerbach (also the inscription on Marx's grave inHighgate Cemetary): "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, invarious ways; the point is to change it." Philosophy thus becomespolitical economy: rather than interpreting the world as it appears to us,the task that Marx sets himnself is to figure out how our social relationscompose our world, and to thereby wrest control of human history from theeconomy.